Until some new self-righteous law stops me, I will continue to write characters who don't follow the rules. My characters are not necessarily representative of the communities in which they live, and I will not hesitate to make them Armenian or Catholic or Pakistani, even if they're not portrayed as perfectly emblematic of Armenians, Catholics or Pakistanis as a whole.

My characters are full of prejudices. My characters may not like Chinese people. My characters may believe that homosexuality is unnatural. My characters may slander Islam, or belief in crystals, or my father's Presbyterianism. My characters murder schoolchildren, plot to massacre two billion people overnight and hit their husbands over the head. My characters are obnoxious, spiteful, seething, difficult, resentful and inconsistent; and no, my characters will not always take their six-year-old kids to therapists to get help. My characters think abominations. In other words, my characters are the closest approximations I can contrive of real people.

About Me

I have published four novels and two books about eighteenth-century British literature; my latest book is "Reading Style: A Life in Sentences." I teach in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.